randomshinichi's Meido Cafe (now with Soapbox!)

2007-Sep-28 - Mai-Hime Overview

Let's tell you about Mai-Hime, which I recently had the opportunity of sampling thanks to a nice guy on RezHub's DirectConnect. As usual the first episode was already enough to hook me (by then he was already offline) and get me downloading the rest via Bittorrent. Ample bandwith ensured that all 4GBs of it finished within a day's time.

Mai-Hime is a rather interesting, if slightly rushed, slice of life-drama-magical girl. At least the people seem to have more background than everybody in Magical Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS combined. That show was a total waste of time. Back to the topic, the only major flaw with Mai-Hime is that it feels quite rushed. It felt like within 2 episodes of introducing Alyssa Searrs the school was taken over and the bridge destroyed. The last arc of the series with everybody fighting against one another was very awesome and almost tear-inducing (the real tear inducing is still X JAPAN! FUCK YEAH) but it still felt like I didn't get almost enough time to get comfortable with the characters. Or maybe I was just feeling a bit removed thanks to the sheer mind-blowing disconnection with real life in the last arc. I mean... never mind. Just watch it. The music's tolerable, at least they don't take the OP theme and make several different arrangements of it (I My Me Strawberry Eggs). The ED theme is great. The animation is great, just what you'd expect from good old Sunrise. Again, I really want to spend more time with the characters, but hey, it's almost there. Besides, any more and I'd really have to get a dual layer DVD if I want it to fit all on one disc.

Which reminds me: now I'm using VirtualDub and x264 to reencode the XVID 640x480 Static-Subs encodes of Mai-Hime. I know, I should do it from a raw, but I'm just too lazy to find alternate subtitles. Besides, I like consistency. All 26 episodes total just a hundred and two megabytes over the standard capacity of a DVD+R. So I'm re-compressing with x264, 750kbps 2 pass. It should give me 25MB extra space per episode, so I'll only need to reencode 5 episodes or so to get all 26 episodes to fit nicely onto a DVD+R. I did the math: I get twice the amount of GBs per Canadian Dollar from a DVD+R than from a DVD+R DL. I'm making sure to choose First Pass (fast) instead of standard First Pass because the standard takes an hour to complete over a 24 minute episode. At the rate this is going on, the first pass should be done in half an hour or so, then the real encoding can begin.

But man, it'd be nice to have some dual layer discs so I wouldn't have to worry about sizes each time I download an anime that's over 13 episodes.

I went down to the library yesterday intending to study physics. I passed this incredible collection of library CDs, and I went crazy. Me and Kathryn collected an armful of CDs each (me classical, her Broadway musicals and soundtracks) and we were thinking about checking them out, but then I had a better idea. Rip it onto my laptop. Awe-fucking-some. Quick as a rabbit it was up and running... I found that Nero AAC only had one thread, and I couldn't wait for that, so I used Lancer's SSE3 MT aoTuV Vorbis encoder. I started off with Earl Wild's transcriptions of Rachmaninov songs... Frank Sinatra and Sextet: Live in Paris... Claude Debussy: Les Trois Sonates.... at this point i figured out I should turn on wireless to get to freedb... Antonio Carlos Jobim Songbook... Liszt - the Schubert Transcriptions II (yes all 3 CDs of that).... some pianist called Murray Perahia playing Mendelssohn.... some guy trying to look badass on the cover, Volodos - Piano Transcriptions.... and finally Bernard Haitink's rendition of The Magic Flute. I'm not a big fan of the Queen of the Night in this version, but Ach ich fuhls from Pamina is great.

Frank Sinatra just said that One For My Baby is his favourite song! He's got taste!

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Welcome to randomshinichi's Meido Cafe, featuring randomshinichi on his Soapbox 24/7! Sometimes I will rant about how awesome Haruhi is, other times Ayanami, other times my Miele TT250 bicycle, or how Vista is retarded but I stick with it only because of Ever17. In any case, enjoy the tea and make sure to listen to randomshinichi when he rants!